Former Apple engineer blames Tim Cook for making the company “boring”

Tim Cook might have turned Apple into the richest company on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that all is well and good in Cupertino. Apple has become increasingly reliant on the iPhone as a source for revenue, and although sales of the iconic handset were booming in 2015, last year turned out to be a “combo-breaker”, asannual profits fell for the first time in 14 years.

Currently, there are concerns that there is not that much room left for innovation with the smartphone. There is also the discontent that stems from Apple’s neglect of previously vital product lines such as the Mac, so it’s hardly surprising that Cook’s policies are being questioned.

The latest batch of criticism comes from Bob Burrough – a former Apple engineer, who worked both under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. In an interview with CNBC, Burrough said that Tim Cook turned the tech giant “from a dynamic change-maker into a boring operations company”. He further stated that while the original iPhone was in the works, the company was in “chaos”, which eventually led to Apple’s biggest invention and the creation of a product that still leads the market to this day:

At Apple in 2007, organizationally it was the wild west. I was hired under a particular manager, but for the first two years worked on projects that had virtually nothing to do with that manager’s core responsibility. That’s because the organization wasn’t the priority, the projects were the priority. It was the exact opposite of ‘not my job.’ It was ‘I’m here to solve whatever problems I can, irrespective of my role, my title, or to whom I report.’ It was wild. But it was also very rewarding, because everything you did had maximal impact on the product.

According to Burrough, nowadays, the “dynamic has clearly and distinctly changed” and the engineer says that Apple is much closer to his job atPalm:

Working at Palm, the teams were highly organizational, [hierarchical] and responsibilities were siloed… There was a clear sense that each person had a clear responsibility, and rarely deviated from it. When you went to someone for help solving a problem ‘not my job’ was a common response.”

Others, like Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, have compared Tim Cook’s management style to that of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. When Ballmer took over from Bill Gates, he managed to triple Microsoft sales, but during his tenure, the tech giant also missed the opportunity to become a major player on the mobile market. It remains to be seen whether Apple will share the same fate as Microsoft and miss out on “the next big thing” in consumer electronics, but considering the company’s reputation and vast resources, it still seems unlikely that future Apple products won’t sell, even if they are not as groundbreaking as the original iPhone.